Baselworld is only a few weeks away. Getting the latest news is easy, Click Here for info on how to join the Watchuseek.com newsletter list. Follow our team for updates featuring event coverage, new product unveilings, watch industry news & more!

We closed on our house last Wednesday, March 14th. We've got a month to officially move in and before that I'd like to do structured wiring from a central room upstairs. There is currently no ethernet run through the house, so that will be all brand new. My question is regarding the existing coaxial cabling.

Cable signal comes into the garage from the tap and plugs directly into a power outlet. (See attached picture) All the previous owners could say about it was that it was installed by Comcast and that it was likely an amplifier. So how does it work? Each of the bedrooms and the living room have coax run to them, but I can't for the life of me figure out how each room is receiving the input signal.

1. Are there splitters hidden in the walls somewhere?
2. Can I leave all the existing cabling in the walls and run my own and connect it to the cable incoming from the garage?

I've done a lot of research about structured wiring, but I have very little understanding of how our house is currently setup. I want to reuse as much as possible.

Unless you have a structured media panel somewhere there is likely a multi-port splitter buried somewhere in a wall or the attic that is feeding to each of the F-connector wallplates in your bedrooms and living spaces.

That wall wart power plug could be any number of things from a step down transformer for some other piece of equipment to a power injector for a powered antenna somewhere or even a power tap for a satellite dish LNB. It may also be powering a splitter/amplifier somewhere in a wall or the attic.

Trace wires where you can. If in *any* doubt, pull your own wires.

Since you have already stated that you are pulling new Ethernet (please tell us it's CAT6 or better) you will want to have 2x RG6 drops per location anyway. Depending on the builder you might only have RG59 in the walls anyway.

Thanks for all the advice. We're stopping by the house to pull the trash out to the street. I'll take a look behind one of the wall plates and see what I can find. I'll bring a ladder tomorrow and head up into the attic to what I can find there.

My initial design was to pull CAT5e and Coaxial into each room. Is the cost negligible between CAT5e and CAT6 now? My plan was also to run at least two RG6 drops to each room.

I guess the next step is to scour the attic and trace the cables as much as I can.

My initial design was to pull CAT5e and Coaxial into each room. Is the cost negligible between CAT5e and CAT6 now? My plan was also to run at least two RG6 drops to each room.

The cost really is negligible betweeen CAT5e and CAT6, at least on the wire side. Connectorising each end might be $0.50 more per instance but if you have any inkling of running a Gigabit network that can handle all the various bandwidth vampires available on the market today; go CAT6. That's not to say CAT5e won't handle Gigabit (it will) but the extra overhead available with CAT6 justifies the small increase in materials cost IMHO.

Plan for, at minimum 2x Ethernet + 2x RG6 drops per plate for "normal" rooms and then double or triple that for your dedicated media spaces.